First off, I’m not talking about India. I’m not a fan of their emissions either, but this discussion is about China.
So you simply can’t engage with this discussion in good faith and are throwing up arbitrary roadblocks so you don’t have to think about things like why climate targets differ relative to development and historical emissions.
I refuse your excuses. India is relevant. Either engage in good faith or I will ignore you.
The narrative you’re promoting right now that individuals are blameless
I’m gonna write this out a third time and bold something. Let’s see if you can pick up on it this time.
This was literally the first thing I wrote to you by the way.
because it’s all the government/industry/capitalism’s fault
Actually capitalism is the social system that ties it all together and is inherently part of industrialization, i.e. the production of virtually all excess GHGs we are talking about, and I’ve explained all of this to a decent degree but you have refused to engage with it even once. Pretending like it isn’t the elephant in the room is foolish.
is not helpful
Correctly identifying primary root causes is actually the most helpful thing to start with. Then we can talk action.
You’re concerned that I’m focusing too much on capitalism in the global GHG discussion where you asked lazy questions to point fingers at consumers? lmao.
I’m not the reason you’re not engaging in good faith in this conversation. Gotta get over this habit of blaming others for your personal disinterest.
Shell manufactures to produce a profit it doesn’t care who buys unless it is perceived as maximizing profit. Downstream costumers are companies, militaries, and individuals.
Shell doesn’t care whether fuel is considered excess by a military. If excess fuel is used by the military to destroy something Shell manufactured it to do that. I think you’re missing the point.
Shell does manufacture excess fuel and oil. Where else does it come from?
Shell does store fuel and oil including for the US military.
Shell isn’t blowing up the “leftover” US military materials sure. Why does that matter here?
Industry makes it under the expectation to turn a profit. Overproduction is common and so is wasteful or pointless production. It doesn’t even need to be “consumed” so long as they get paid. The US military constantly blows up “leftover” materials to ensure they get the same budget next year, for example. And most sales are between industries. How efficiently are those industries using all their purchases? Have you ever worked in a restaurant?
If consumer choice doesn’t enter the equation then you’ve proved my point. Focus should be on the system itself that forces emissions as part of core economic activity.
Your question was, “Who buys and burns most of the fuel they create and why?” and I answered it and explained how it works. It’s mostly industry The answer is absolutely not simply “consumer choice”, which is quite clear if you review my simple 2-point list.
Here I’ll write it again:
The cause of this is not individual consumer choices, it is capitalism - it seeks to increase capital and nothing else. Capital does not care about the emissions of growing fruit in Central America, packaging in Thailand, and selling in Germany. It cares that you buy the fruit cup for more than they spent on it. And to make that happen, capital had to force wages and production to be depressed and scattered across the globe. And it’s not going to waste money on making the processes themselves independent of fossil fuels so long as fossil fuel prices are low enough - and it keeps them low by constantly seeking more extraction for profit.
The reason I’m not debating China’s flavor of capitalism is because it’s irrelevant.
You brought it up (and are reasserting it in this quote), same as how you bring up China unasked. Clearly you thought it was relevant, you are just trying to avoid responsibility for your claims.
They don’t get a free pass on carbon emissions no matter what economy they have.
Which part of “meeting or exceeding their Paris targets” reads as “get a free pass” to you?
And yes there’s a trade-off, regulating fossil fuels increases production costs. That’s the trade-off everybody makes.
Oh so the decision of what to target isn’t just “no increases immediately”? Glad we agree and can stop pretending it’s so simplistic. Though I see you neglected to acknowledge India’s targets.
Bottom line is that China’s emissions are huge and still growing. They are meeting commitments because those commitments were low in the first place.
The commitments of China were nearly an order of magnitude higher than the EU and US actually. By the way the US withdrew and is going hog wild.
For example China only commited to peak emissions by 2030.
And they are meeting their commitments, even exceeding them, despite being the primary seat of global production while the EU continues to deindustrialize.
The US and EU never needed to make such a commitment because they had already reached their peak in 2005.
In production, yes. They are deindustrializing. Their targets are much easier to hit, they follow the global capitalist economic trend re: imperialism, offshoring. It is actually much harder to reduce emissions while taking on the industry that’s being outsourced.
And yes they perform a large portion of the world’s manufacturing, this “shuffling” of industries that you mentioned. But their lower regulations on emissions is precisely one of the reasons why manufacturing moves there. If they regulated more heavily, then some manufacturing would move out, but at least total global emissions would go down.
It’s really not. You move production to China because overall it is vastly cheaper, primarily due to the much lower costs of labor reproduction and how tightly integrated industries are and can be due to infrastructure and colocation of technical ability. If you want to make something in the US something like half your cost goes to maintaining the humans doing it, and they’re expensive due to massive economic leeches: real estate, finance, insurance. When 80% of a paycheck goes to having a place to live (just renting), going to the doctor, and eating, your labor costs are just subsidizing rent seeking and finance.
Every country needs to participate in raising the cost of fossil fuels, in order for it to work.
Every country needs to meet their climate commitments. Is yours?
My comment directly replied to what you said. I numbered the bullet points, literally the first thing I wrote.
Various global poverty stats produced by major entities, e.g. below $x per day by the World Bank (which keeps changing its metrics but that’s a different discussion). Capital apologists like (incidentally Epstein-tied) Pinker attempt to claim improvements to human development and well-being for capitalism, but these statistics are highly sensitive to exactly which countries you include as well as what metrics you use. But a trend re: global poverty alleviation is that China is responsible for most of it, sometimes the vast majority for certain statistics, and trends can reverse when you remove it from the equation.
India is a good metric for comparison. Similar population size, similar location, formerly colonized and formally liberated around the same time, but two very different paths. Capitalist economist Amartya Sen estimated tens of millions of deaths in India alone every decade in comparison to China.
If you want to have a conversation you’ll need to reply to what I actually said.
Yes, walkable cities and trains but also planning out where people live and work. Where people live is currently left up to the anarchy of the market, real estate speculation, where employment is located, etc. Then they have to get from where they live to other places they want or need to be, usually work. With some planning these things can be made intentionally dense, closer together, cheaper, and on transit lines.
The cause of this is not individual consumer choices, it is capitalism - it seeks to increase capital and nothing else. Capital does not care about the emissions of growing fruit in Central America, packaging in Thailand, and selling in Germany. It cares that you buy the fruit cup for more than they spent on it. And to make that happen, capital had to force wages and production to be depressed and scattered across the globe. And it’s not going to waste money on making the processes themselves independent of fossil fuels so long as fossil fuel prices are low enough - and it keeps them low by constantly seeking more extraction for profit.
These companies are monopolies, they can’t be significantly materially affected by a consumer boycott. Most of their customers are in industry anyways. Any boycott against them is more about raising awareness than achieving something, it’s a diffuse form of political education.
To take on the fossil fuel industry requires having control over big levers at the top of the economy. Those levers are currently pulled, anarchically, by capital, not actual humans. Capital pulls those levers and spurns its highest level servants to get out of the way or feed it more bodies. To end this society-wide violence we must displace capital, it must not be in charge. We must be in charge.
Basically all of the political class supports the fossil fuel industry, “voters” do not have a ballot option for dismantling it. Some Green parties promise it, perhaps, but they will immediately run into larger economic challenges that require them to take a socialist analysis and approach and this results in them being sidelined by the actual master in these countries: capital.
Individual consumer shaming for society-level problems is usually corporate PR to defend from interventions. The classic example is the invention of the “litterbug” when companies introduced disposable but not easily reusable or compostable packaging and trash was piling up in much larger quantities. There were movements against using the packaging itself. The “litterbug” PR campaign successfully changed the narrative to make this litter an individual problem to shame people for rather than a problem with capital. Similarly, there were many movements against cars in the beginning. It was considered outrageous when “chauffeur’s” would hit pedestrians, there were calls for entire bans. There were multifaceted PR pushes to instead shift blame to pedestrians while giving cars exclusive use of the streets, pushing pedestrians to the side and calling them “jaywalkers” if a car hit them. Both of these cases also involved heavy lobbying/bribery of the political class, same as today.
And regarding your other points, don’t forget urban planning. Trains and urban planning go hand in hand. You can’t transform transportation by trains alone if everything is suburbs and city jobs, for example.
Goddamn you really are just sinophobic for capital.
Everybody’s economy is different, China is no snowflake.
Actually it is. The trajectory of other peripheral countries is quite different. Compare to India, look at poverty stats when China is removed.
But I am not going to debate whether China’s capitalism is “good capitalism” or not, that feels like pulling hairs and is a digression as you yourself said.
You can’t debate the topic at all, clearly, but sure want to continue making the claim that it simply switched to capitalism. Maybe don’t say things your can’t bc defend?
How much should China regulate? At the very least enough to stop the growth. I think that’s a simple enough answer.
It doesn’t address the obvious trade-off I laid out. Why are India’s Paris commitments currently greater than zero?
So, what was China’s target for peak emissions? What does peak emissions mean? How are they doing regarding that target?
Not true. The US and EU have been lowering emissions for the past 20 years.
If you focus solely on production you can eke out such numbers, but it ignores the basics of imperialism and the aforementioned offshoring where industry doesn’t just magically become green. Shuffling around where industry is located didn’t decrease emissions by itself. Emissions targets do not stick exclusively to production and, I have to repeat again because you keep ignoring it, the US and EU are failing to meet their commitments. Yet you focus on one of the few countries that is. I wonder why. I wonder why you ignore 80% of what I say. Perhaps you should take a little break.
If you include consumption the plots look very different. And I’m not aware of easily available stats that track based on industry ownership.
It’s not a whataboutism to ask you to acknowledge the principals behind how GHG targets are set via an example when you’re using a simplistic bar to attack another one.
Guess your answer is no, you aren’t going to engage in good faith. Bye.